There is a trend in non-fiction — in fact my editor has been on to me about this lately — to reveal things. Apparently, readers like to feel they've got the inside track, even when there are no secrets to uncover. Perhaps this drove Yasha Levine to call his new book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. It promises to shine a light on the close and ongoing relationship between state surveillance and Silicon Valley. There are two problems with this. First, most of it is not secret. Second, I don't think it's right.
For all its later ubiquity, the internet started life as a niche project funded by the US Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s to connect the tiny number of computers engaged in the computer science projects it supported. While ARPA was indeed part of the Department of Defense, much of its research, including this project, was unclassified. Indeed, the network was literally called the ARPANET. But it went far beyond this, argues Levine, and was always intended to be a large-scale surveillance tool, with monitoring of populations ‘built in'. Most historians of the early internet, reckons Levine, have glossed over this bit.
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